About orchestrated and parallel activation

The Orchestrated activation option allows nondisruptive updates of interconnects in a production ready, properly configured, and redundant environment. Orchestrated firmware updates do not affect the network traffic and no outages are caused while the update process is in progress as one virtual connect module is always forwarding network traffic, with no or minimal impact to application network connection.

A default delay of 8 minutes is set between activating or rebooting interconnect modules.

Hypervisor clusters are updated nondisruptively when the orchestrated activation option is chosen. If the logical enclosure contains one or more hypervisor profiles, each hypervisor is serially placed into a maintenance mode before updating. It can take up to 90 minutes to place a hypervisor into the maintenance mode, perform the firmware update, and take it back out of the maintenance mode.

Parallel activation activates all the interconnect modules at the same time, resulting in disruption of the network and storage connectivity. It is recommended to perform parallel activation during a maintenance window when you can better coordinate the downtime.